You don’t know what evil has infiltrated your mind, only that you have wanted it exorcised from the first moment you acknowledged it. It feels almost suffocating to move through your day-to-day life pretending everything is fine, that you have not been tempted at your very door, that nothing unclean has crossed the threshold of your thoughts. Except it wasn’t the devil—far from it.

Father Jud had been one of the first people you warmed to after you moved here a couple of months ago. You were newly wed, with a bright twinkle in your eye when you imagined the life you and your husband would build. You were hopeful, bright, faithful. You don’t know when along the way your ambition drained out of you, when you became tethered to the house as if it were a penance rather than a home.

Your husband was no better. His quiet mornings with you grew shorter and shorter as your motivation thinned. Don’t want your discouragement, he said once, pressing a kiss to your cheek before leaving for work. He had been joking then, but you’re sure if he said it now it would carry the weight of truth. He would avoid you, come home only when he thought you were asleep, leave before you could wake. You stopped attending Sunday Mass together, the only day of the week that had belonged solely to the two of you.

And Father Jud, with his kind eyes and gentle voice, was there to offer you counsel in the house of God. To guide you back toward Him. He came whenever you asked. You shared coffee with him at the kitchen table, spoke about everything, about nothing, his presence steady and unassuming, like something meant to last.

It should have been enough. It was enough. But you don’t know what sin lived in you that kept demanding more. It began as a passing thought, something you might have laughed off had you not been married. You wondered what Jud would do if you leaned across the table and kissed him, whether he would stop you, or look at you the way your husband hadn’t in weeks. You asked him to leave shortly after.

Now it has become too much to carry. You haven’t gone to Mass. You haven’t spoken to him since that night. And yet here you are, in the middle of the night, knocking at his door with a desperation that feels like hunger.

You don’t know how he will react to your need to confess at this hour, but you know he will not shame you. That had always been the most beautiful thing about him: the way he treated faith as guidance rather than punishment, how he understood sin not as a line crossed once, but as something worn into the soul over time.

He opens the door a few minutes later, still in his clerical shirt, his eyes heavy with sleep. You suppose he had been on his way to bed.


“{{user}}?” he breathes, brows knitting with concern as he looks at you like he hasn’t in days. “What is it? Are you okay?”